Skies
by AzaleaRill
Summary: Gender-bent version based on the movie. I borrowed dialogue, but the story is substantially different.
1. Chapter 1

"Not good, Sheriff."

That was the situation, according to the arresting officer. He had a young man in cuffs sitting on the ground against the body of an old model, rusted out Chevy. Another group of officers were clustered together at their vehicles, talking and looking toward a small, dilapidated building. There was a sizable hole in the brick facade.

"Doug? What's going on out here?" The voice behind him made Doug Waters sigh in relief. Now he could get back into the territory he knew - dealing with crime. Jesse Caldwell, Social Services Specialist extraordinaire could sort out the "personalities" involved.

"Jesse, thanks for making the drive," he said - gratitude more than apparent in his voice.

"Are we still in Wheaton County?" she asked, only half-joking. They stood, a motherly figure and the aging sherrif, in a field of old vehicles, weeds and litter cluttering the grass around sun baked fenders and random engine parts.

"Barely," he mumbled in response to her question. It had taken two dirt roads and crossing a cattle guard to get out to the "Vintage Vehicle Viewing Museum", but the ruckus had obviously caught enough attention to actually get them here.

"Did I ruin your Sunday?" he asked, going for easy banter with a woman he really wanted to get to know better.

"Well, I guess if somebody was going to, I'm glad it was you." Jesse smiled a little, blushing like a girl still in her twenties.

Sheriff Waters was just getting up the nerve to ask about coffee at a certain cafe when a deputy interrupted their "moment."

"Doug, I can hear it again...movin' around in there."

"Tell me you didn't try and go in there," Sheriff Waters sighed, burdened with to many cocksure kids in volatile times.

"You bet your ass I didn't."

Well, at least there was that. Maybe too many video games and shoot 'em ups put some sense into them rather than the other way around. There might me a chainsaw wielding gorilla or something in there after-all.

"They said Mrs. Reed's still in the hospital, right?" Jesse asked as she and the sheriff made their way to the building.

"I'm guessing," he said, "since last I heard she was near-in a coma or something. Neighbors say she suffered a bad stroke few weeks back and they haven't seen anybody out here since. Thing is, center got a 911 call early this morning - mostly static, but it was alive line. So we sent a patrol out and next thing you know, couple of my boys see the side of the building just explode outward." They had started picking their way through the debris of brick and wood toward the gaping hole. "They picked up that guy about 20 feet away," he said, referring to the cuffed individual. "He said he was trying to crawl in a window when he got thrown, uh, out, with the wall following suite."

"Doug, what am I doing here?" Jesse asked, leaning into the dark building through the irregular opening.

"Well, neighbors also say there's some kind of person been wondering around the pastures at night. This is the only place with a building on it and there haven't been reports from the farmers that their houses or barns were invaded, so I took a wild guess that there might be someone else here. Someone who wired up an explosion to keep our friend over there out. And to tell you the truth, if it's someone holed up and wandering around at night...well...I couldn't for the life of me think of who else to call."

"Degenerates Are Us, Doug? Is that it?" Jesse crossed her arms, expressing slight indignation.

The sheriff snorted. "If that's all I thought of you, Jess, you'd still be enjoying your after-church-lunch right now." With that, he stepped out of the bright morning light into the dusty darkness and clicked on his flashlight. "Whoever's here is probably scared enough and I thought maybe you could come down and talk 'em out of here without us having to go in and drag someone out."

"Some of your officers talk like they saw something, like a phantom or ghost."

At that moment, just as Jess was following him into the dark, a pale figure crossed a doorway on the edge of the light. She had to do a few moments of breath holding to keep herself from running. Doug swung the flashlight around, the beam dancing off of chrome. They were in some kind of "showroom" of the museum and had to work their way around several old machines to get to the door. Doug didn't hesitate in shining his flashlight around the corner, braver than Jess would have been by far. There was a short hall and a closed door in the direction the figure had gone.

No, not closed they discovered as the light revealed a darker line where the door had been left slightly open. From that dark aperture, a sudden gleam off a mirrored surface sent Jessie's heart skittering like a mouse running for cover. She felt the sheriff jump as well, but the more experienced man recovered quickly and went forward to push the door open.

In the darkened room beyond, there was a small pool of light from a battery powered lantern and the faint outline of a figure just beyond the light.

"Hello?" said Jessie. "Hey, my name is Jessie. Are you okay in here?"

Silence.

"Hey, if you're afraid, you don't need to be with me." She moved past the protective form of the sheriff and held up her hands in a placating gesture.

"I'm not afraid," said a clear, quiet female voice.

"What's your name?" Jessie asked, reaching a hand into the weak lantern light toward the figure.

"Skies," said the woman. A hand, white as chalk, hesitantly grasped Jessie's.

"Is that a name or a nickname?" she asked, slightly pulling Skies into the light.

Pale, pink eyes moved between Jessie and Sheriff Waters. The pale hand drew back to push a strand of milk white hair away from the waxen face, then moved to clutched a pair of sunglasses as if she thought they might be taken away.

"It was an accident," Skies said, ignoring the previous question. "He was breaking in and I just wanted him to leave."

"You're not in any trouble right now miss," said Sheriff Waters, finally finding his voice. He went into business mode to compensate for the momentary shock "What's your real name?"

"Jeahana Reed," she said, looking at the floor as if admitting her name was some king of unacceptable behavior.

"You haven't been out here alone since Caroline got sick, have you?" Jessie asked, noting how the t-shirt and jeans seemed to hang on the small woman's thin frame. Even the white cotton of the simple shirt seemed dingy against the pallor of Skies' skin.

"Aunt Carrie said to watch the place while she was gone. She said she just had to go to the doctor and would be back soon."

"How long has it been since you ate?" asked the sheriff, looking around and seeing nothing but shelf upon shelf of books.

Skies shrugged. "It was okay until the lights and water turned off. Then I just read up on herbology and went out a night."

Sheriff Waters was out of his depth. "You read about what?"

"Hey Doug," Jesse interrupted. "Why don't you go tell the folks outside everything's all right and see if we can't clear some space to take Miss Reed into town."

* * *

"Mitch, go clear 'em back," Sheriff Waters said to his deputy. The small band of police had been joined by a couple curious farmers. They shuffled back from where they had been beginning to inspect the damage to the building; all except the young man in cuffs on the ground and his warden.

"What's with him?"

The bored police officer looked down and nudged his charge who seemed to be peacefully napping in the sun. "He was in a state when we got out here, talking about lightening from a clear sky. Guess he's sleeping it off."

Doug Waters sighed, feeling like a long-suffering parent, and gestured to the figures of Jessie and Skies to come out. Even the birds seemed shocked into silence at the appearance of the small, albino woman with her mirrored sunglasses and mane of long, snowy hair. Everyone just stared. Skies got as far as the rusted out body of the Chevy before stopping and staring back.

"It's all right," said Jessie. "You don't have to be afraid."

"You're afraid," said Skies, putting her hand on the old car as if to steady herself. "You're afraid for me." She rubbed her hand over the peeling paint on the hood of the car. It was almost as if she were talking to the old machine rather than Jessie.

Then she did something no one would forget for a long time. She looked down at her hand and seemed to trace a line to the man sitting on the ground.

"He's hurt," she said, softly, clearly. "Glass..." Skies abruptly took her hand from the old car, turned and walked to Jessie.

Sheriff Waters watched them get in the Jessie's SUV and start on their way before going over to the man by the car. He shook him a couple times and only received a low moan in response before the young man slumped sideways, revealing a congealing pool of blood in the long grass.

* * *

 **More to come...**


	2. Chapter 2

"Sorry," said Jessie lamely as they bumped over the potholes in an almost non-existent dirt road and a pile of thick paperbacks slid from the dash and onto Skies lap. "I'm kind-of a mobile school-room and things pile up."

"I've never been to school," Skies said wistfully as she quickly flipped through one of the books and then hugged it to her chest. "I've read about it though."

"Do you read a lot?" Jessie asked as she pulled onto the main road, utilizing her counseling toolkit that was stored in her mind and starting the assessment process that worked best. "Did your aunt teach you how?"

Skies shook her head. "I can't remember not knowing how to read. Aunt Caroline got lots of books from garage sales and I just read whatever she brought." A vehicle passed and she watched it from behind her sunglasses as if it were a living specimen presented for her evaluation.

"So you read all those books that were in your...room?" Jessie asked, uncertain what to call the space occupied by only walls of texts and a single lantern.

Skies nodded while still staring out the window at the passing landscape which was becoming more populated the nearer they got to the city limits.

"Have you read this one?" Jessie asked, referring to the book in Skies' grasp, _Shakespeare's plays, unabridged._ They had come to a stoplight near the edge of town and she wanted to keep the young woman talking.

Instead of answering, Skies held out the book to her. "Do you want to see a trick? Pick a page."

Jessie furrowed her brow and mouth the word _okay._ Glancing between the red light and the book, she hurriedly opened it to somewhere in the middle. "Two Hundred and sixteen."

Skies turned back to stare out the window. "Where lies the final harbor, whence we unmoor no more. In what rapt ether sails the world of which the weariest will never weary? Where is the foundling's father hidden? Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them. And the secret of our paternity lies in their grave, and we must there learn it." Jessie followed the speech from the middle of the page as Skies recited it, completely forgetting about the stop light.

"So you have read it?" she asked uncertainly, wondering how Skies could know what was on the page Jessie had randomly flipped to. "Do you...you know the whole book?"

"I did read it," Skies said, turning back to Jessie. "And if I could borrow it, I would like to read it slower than I just did."

Jessie stared at her. Surely Skies didn't mean the ruffling of the pages that she'd given the book earlier was what she meant about having read it! She was attempting to frame some sort of question to ask the younger woman that would make sense of the situation, but a blaring horn behind them interrupted her thoughts as an impatient pickup truck behind them indicated the stop light had turned green.


	3. Chapter 3

"Come on now, let me have it!"  
"Okay, come on, let's go!"  
"Damion, I wanna play!"  
"Down! Set!"  
"All right, set, Chrissy! Get out of the way! You're too little."  
"Damion, don't! Mom!"  
"Get her out the way! Come on!"

Kids shouted and threw a football in a fenced-in play area as Jessie pulled up what appeared to be a small apartment complex. She jammed the vehicle into park and threw open the door. "Damion, you better stop that roughhousing with your sister or your mom's going to get a note and have to ground you from the yard!" She slammed the door shut and sighed in exasperation as one of the bigger boys gave her a dirty look.

"Some of our kids," she said to Skies by way of explanation. "Their mom's homeschool them, or are supposed to, until they get restraining orders or…" Jessie stopped and shook her head as if in confusion. "Wait, wait, I'm getting way ahead of myself."

"... _homeless shelter, halfway-house, women's shelter, you're not sure what to call it_ ," Skies said in a sing-song voice, staring into space behind her sunglasses as she pushed the button on the automatic window. It whirred up and down in the unsettled moment that Jessie tried to figure out if Skies had read her mind. Then, reaching over, she stopped the obsessive motion by covering the small, bone-white hand with her own.

"It was Jeahana, right?" Jessie asked.

"Skies," the other women insisted, looking intently at their two hands and the contrast they made.

"Okay," Jessie said, pulling her hand back. "I'll call you that if you like, but you have to tell me how you got such a nickname. Did your aunt come up with it?"

"An old man used to come and work on the cars," Skies said. "I got to sit by and hand him tools. He had a funny accent; always said I looked like an angel in disguise. Except he said _de skies_. 'Where's de skies?' he would ask. I think he was making fun of himself, but it stuck."

"Mamma, what is that thing?" A young girl was suddenly beside the car, pointing and yelling back to her mother. Skies shrank from the attention.

"I need to go inside," she said quietly.

* * *

"You need to see her, Aaron, to know what I'm saying," Jessie was on the phone in her office. She had a good view through the open door of the dining room and its occupants. "You need to see her sitting out there right now." A pause, "No, I want her to be able to stay here for a little bit - the way she's lived… she needs to be around people. I think she'd starve to death before having to go out on her own."

Skies sat by herself in the cafeteria, a space filled with mismatched dining room tables and chairs. It had been Jessie's idea that families sit together at these out-of-place tables and have meals like they were at home. It didn't really go over, especially as there was no way to police who sat where as the hustle of come-and-go meal times would over-ride any order imposed upon it. The women congregated at a few separate tables and the kids just ran pell mell and ended up wherever they wanted.

The square, pseudo-wood table Skies had chosen was now treated as an island that the children were dared by each other to run past. One small girl, braver than the others, stopped and peered over the edge of the table.

"Hi," she said timidly.

Skies lifted her eyes from stirring lumpy mashed potatoes and smiled briefly.

"You have pink eyes!" the girl exclaimed. "I had a bunny with pink eyes, but daddy didn't…"

"Shut up, Chrissy!" A boy, the one who Jessie had yelled at earlier on the playground, came up and roughly shoved the smaller girl aside. She caught her foot on the table leg and, falling, began a sputtering pout.

"Why you look like that?" The boy ignored his sister's snivels. Skies dropped her eyes back to the tray in front of her. "You look like some kind of vampire from outer space or something," the boy continued. "You got some kind of disease?"

The little girl on the floor wiped at her dripping nose and teary eyes. Skies flicked her gaze at a pile of napkins and one drifted off the table, folded itself into butterfly and landed on the girl's knee. She stared at it in wonder and reached out to touch it. Suddenly, the boy grabbed it and crumpled it into a wad. "It's just a napkin, stupid." He threw it on the floor.

Just as Chrissy's tears were building again, another napkin butterfly drifted by her. It flicked it's wings, then wadded itself into a ball and launched itself at Daimon.

"Hey! He yelled when it hit him in the forehead. Another one followed, and another, and another. For a moment, the air was full of wings and snowballs. Chrissy laughed.

"What the hell?!" A stout women strode over and banged her fist on the table. The flurry of flying paper suddenly stopped and all dropped limp to the ground. Skies looked up at the woman with a "neat trick huh?" look on her face. It melted in the animosity of the other's glare.

"Momma," said Chrissy, pulled at the woman's pant leg. "She made butterflies."

The woman pulled Chrissy off the floor and cuffed Daimon upside the head. "Get yourselves outta here." She turned back to Skies. "I don't like your eyes, lady. Stay away from my kids." With that, she stalked off.


	4. Chapter 4

"You see Steven?"

"Dr. James? He was here most of the night, making sure vitals were staying stable. He made the lab transfuse more blood this morning even though he hadn't slept. I just hooked it up."

"Probably did more good than the stuff in the blood bank could have, closest relative and all. Did you hear about what happened out at that old car place? They say some girl threw a wall on top of him."

"That ghost looking girl they got at the shelter? She did that?"

There was the sound of a clearing throat. "Aren't there rounds to be done?"

"Yes, Dr. James. Just waiting for your signature here. " the embarrassed answer. David drifted further up toward consciousness, a dull pain lancing up his arm. He opened his eyes and a trio of figures swam into focus. He pinpointed on one, a dark haired man in a lab coat with his sleeve pushed all the way up, a colorful band around his elbow. David tried to shift in the uncomfortable hospital bed and found the arm not swathed in bandages was handcuffed to the bedrail.

"Don't even try. You're not going anywhere for awhile." Dr. Steven James came to the bedside, self-consciously jerking down the sleeve of his lab coat as David's eyes fixed on the bandage. "You managed to lose a lot of blood this time, along with your sanity. I'm ordering Phenodaxin twice a day…"

"I'm not crazy, Steve."

David's brother crossed his arms in a show of long suffering frustration. "Still hearing voices? Still seeing things?"

"It's not like that…"

"It's called Schizophrenia and it needs to be treated. It's also what's keeping you out of prison for the time being, so you'd better just be goddamned thankful." Steven jerked open a clean syringe and punched it into a vial, his anger apparent in every motion.

"You're going back into outpatient therapy and I've convinced the judge that for now the only sentence you get is an ankle monitor." He stabbed David with the needle none to gently. "You know the side-effects. Try and man-up for a change." With that, he disposed of the syringe, stripped off the latex gloves and stormed out of the room. David gripped the bed-rail in his good hand as the first wave of nausea started to build.

* * *

Skies took the "stay away" pronouncement from Chrissy and Damion's mother to heart. The other occupants of the shelter, including Jesse, only caught fleeting glimpses of her for the next week. After a flurry of paperwork to okay Skies for temporary residency, she'd gotten swept back into the daily management of the place; court cases, home-school accreditation, minor disputes and new residents. By the time she came up for air, she realized Skies had retreated as much as if she were still living in the dark at the abandoned car museum.

She found her in the dorm-sized room that had hastily been cleared of storage to accommodate a single resident with no family. Skies was sitting on the bed in front of the window - something she ordinarily avoided due to her sensitivity to light, but the day was gray and drizzling. She was reading the Shakespeare tome she acquired in Jessie's car, turning the pages slowly as if the book were a delicate object to be cherished and read with great care.

"Jeahana, can come in?"

Skies looked over her shoulder, blinking as if coming out of a deep sleep and having to focus on the world for a moment. Even in the dim light from the window, the washed out color of her t-shirt seemed startling against the marble white of her skin.

"Listen, uh," said Jessie, wondering how to start such a conversation with a recluse. "I want you to think about something. There are seminars in town at the behavioral health clinic. A lot of the women go to fulfil court orders or as part of some treatment program…"

Skies hadn't moved, just sat still and silent as the statue she resembled.

"Anyway, um, all I'm saying is, if you'd like to attend one, kind of try and socialize a little bit, I want you to do that. Start thinking about what's next…"

Skies turned her gaze back toward the book and Jessie was just about to take that as a "no" when the other woman said quietly: "Will it be outside?"


	5. Chapter 5

It did turn out to be an outside venue with the center using an amphitheater that had been built into a hillside and used a flat space backed by scrub as a stage area. Skies sat at the top of the hillside seating in the shadow of a retaining wall, large sunglasses in place. The day was overcast and the shade of the wall helped. She wore long sleeves and pants, keeping her gaze cast down, but there wasn't much she could do about the long ponytail of white hair or the brilliance of her face even in the dark shadow of the wall.

Most of the crowd would have its back to her as they came in and few scanned the crowd, so there were only a couple of wide eyes and stares as the seats filled up. Skies flicked her gaze up once in awhile to check for gawkers and saw someone she recognized. He sat near the front and leaned against a railing, his body language conveying that he did not feel well. His left arm was swathed up the the elbow in a bandage, the result of guarding his face when a window jumped off the building at him, followed by a sizable amount of the wall moments later.

"Good day everyone!" a cheerful voice called their attention to the staging area. "Thank you for coming to our monthly seminar - or rather, thank all those who made you come!" A few titters from the audience. "Today we have one of our communities own fire fighters with us who is going to be demonstrating my metaphor of 'pressure' for us. He's got his handy dandy gear and there just happens to be a hydrant right here, so let's get started!"

Skies anxiously watched the hydrant as the speaker launched into a spiel about pressure in life and the course it takes when it builds up and has no outlet. To demonstrate this, the firefighter used a large wrench to loosen a part on the hydrant. Water began to shoot from all around the loosened seal.

"So as you can see, pressure can build to a point where if the tiniest crack appears, stuff will just let loose and there is no real control. Usually, we'd hook a hose up to this hydrant and then let the pressure off and all that water is under control and has some place to go - we aren't going to loose it here without the hose - and you don't want to either. We need an outlet for whatever that pressure is that builds in us…"

Skies clenched her fists, eyes still fastened to the hydrant and the powerful spray from the loosened seal. She felt the uncontrollable force of the water - felt how it fought against the restriction to its flow. Something in her wanted to reach out and release it.

"Not here," she whispered through clenched teeth, the memory of gathering a force to a breaking point and the release all to fresh in her mind.

"When too much pressure builds up and you ignore it," the presenter was saying, unaware of the slight rattle the hydrant had began to take on as the firefighter fitted the wrench to reconnect the seal. "When you ignore it or don't try and get help, that's when a breakdown happens."

"Shit," Skies whispered, every muscle in her body clenched.

"Hey, are you alright?" someone nearby asked.

And just like that, her control was gone. Skies instinctually flinched at the intrusion on her concentration and all the lines linking her somehow with the natural force of the water broke. At the same time, the hydrant cap burst off, miraculously missing the people on the stage. Water shot out and then began to gush by the gallon into the small clearing.

The audience clapped a bit, thinking it was part of the demonstration. No one was really alarmed until they heard the sound, almost like gunshots, of hydrants exploding behind them in the parking lot and down the block. Skies slumped where she sat, unable to move as the roaring of a wave of water approached. It burst over the top of the embankment like a dam breaking through a barrier and flowed down the hill in a torrent. At first it waterfalled over the retaining wall and people scrambled to avoid being swept away, some seeking refuge against the wall itself as the water arced overhead. But then it took on a steady flow and began to sluice down the wall itself. Almost everyone was able to wade against the tide to safety - a few were swept off their feet but were quickly pulled back upright by others. Skies merely wrapped her arms around herself and let the water have her.

The water picked her up as if hailing her for it's freedom, then it washed her down the slope like a bit of detritus. She fell into the great pool forming and sank, refusing to fight against the force of the water from above that now held her under.

* * *

A rush of air forcing itself into her lungs was what brought Skies to partial consciousness. It felt like a great hammer was beating on her chest, and then there was warmth against her mouth and a new rush of air forced the water out of her lungs. Someone turned her over, held her up as she coughed and coughed. There was a blare of sirens that, though the lights accompanying them were very near, sounded as if they were far down a tunnel.

"Just breathe," a distant voice was saying. "Just breathe."

As paramedics surrounded them, Skies blearily saw out the corner of her eye a white-swathed arm braced against the ground as the other held her up. A series of red blotches where blooming against the soaked bandages.

She'd made him bleed again.


	6. Chapter 6

"The local news and those Channel 5 people are outside, Sheriff," said an orderly to Doug Waters as he stood at the nurse's station. "So is Jimmy Hobbs from the newspaper."

"Tell them to go home," he said absently, shuffling through a report. "Tell them there's no fatalities, no sex scandal. That will get rid of them fast."

"... I can't do it. I've got no authorization to let anyone in." A nurse was barring the way as Jessie tried to make her way down the hall. "I can't let you go anywhere."

"Doug," Jessie said, setting eyes on him. "Doug, tell them that it's okay for me to see her."

Thankfully, to Doug anyway, Dr. James walked in at that moment. "Steven," the sheriff said, "Just the man I wanted to see. How's Miss Reed?"

"Well," said the doctor tossing his clipboard on the counter with a clatter. "If David hadn't been there and a lot of people hadn't seen it, I'd say it's impossible that she practically drowned."

"Yeah, good thing about your brother knowing CPR and keeping on it. I think most would have given up after so long, but he just kept on." Doug was glad he had something positive to say about Steven's brother rather than to tell him he had the younger James boy in a holding cell again.

Steven took off his glasses and pressed his fingers against his forehead. "No, what I'm saying Doug is that there's no evidence that anything actually happened to her. No traces of water in her lungs, no trauma from being washed down that hill and then having David beat on her chest for so long." He flipped through some of the notes on the chart. "if she actually went that long without breathing, she should be in a coma from oxygen deprivation. Instead, she sitting in there on the bed without a bruise. For all I can tell, she could have just woken up from a nap!"

"I have 20 different people telling me 20 different stories," Jessie interrupted. "But they all agree that she went under the water and looked pretty much dead when David dragged her out. Some of them said it was like the water was coming after her personally."

"That just doesn't make sense," Doug said. "Why did all those hydrants blow anyway? Same kind of weird stuff as happened out…" He trailed off, realizing he was describing another situation which involved Skies.

"Dr. James?" A nurse called to Steven from down the hall.

"Yes?"

"309 is vacant, but it's on my sheet here as occupied by a Miss Reed. Did I miss a discharge?"


	7. Chapter 7

Skies walked slowly down a dirt path behind a neighborhood near the hospital. The evening light was not so strong that she had to stick to the shade and it was almost a pleasant walk.

Almost.

She had no idea where to go.

A dog began to bark furiously at her from behind a short, wrought-iron fence. A sudden gust of wind pelted it with dry leaves and sand.

Animals had never really liked her. They could feel the tenuous control she had on overwhelming forces and either reacted as the dog had or avoided her all together.

"Rocky!" she heard someone yell. "Rocky! come here. Come here, boy." David James walked out of a nearby backyard garage and wrangled the dog. "You never bark at people, what's with you?"

Then he looked up and saw Skies.

"Wow," he said awkwardly after a moment. "I can't believe I'm looking at you. Are you okay?"

"I didn't mean for you to get hurt," Skies said, looking down and scuffing her still-slightly-sodden shoes in the grass.

David looked at his arm for a moment and then waved it off. "That wasn't your fault," he said, misunderstanding the context of her words. "My life's kind of crazy anyway."

From next door, two little dogs began barking viciously from behind their wire fence. A lady hurried out of the house and scooped them up, giving both David and Skies distrusting looks as she retreated quickly.

"You must feel like you've got two heads the way everybody looks at you around here, huh?"

Skies turned back to look at him, pink eyes illuminated strangely by the setting sun. "How is it crazy?" she asked him. "Your life?"

David laughed a little, realizing how flaky what he'd said must sound to reclusive albino who'd just seemingly come back from the dead.

"Just, family stuff I guess." He said lamely.

"You listen to people from the inside..." she said, squinting her eyes. "No...you hear memories...ghosts that aren't yours."

David stared at her for a moment and tried to find something to say. Rocky, who had been quietly growling at his side, took the initiative to leap at Skies once more, breaking the silence with a cacophony of barking. David wrestled him to a tie-down in the yard and made sure he was secure before walking back to Skies and opening the gate.

"Can I show you something?"


	8. Chapter 8

"I think there's a part here," David's muffled voice came to Skies where she sat with her back against a standing tool box. "There's a part that's so rusted it wouldn't matter if everything else was running - this beast still wouldn't go." He slid out from under the car and brushed the rust and dirt off his face and out of his hair. Giving a sigh, he said: "It won't come out either."

"So this was Raymond's?" Skies asked, sweeping her gaze over weathered hulk of a vehicle.

"The real question is -" David said dramatically, "- who is Raymond?"

"You don't know?"

"Welcome to my life!" David stood and kicked the roller-board aside. He opened a back-passenger door and peered inside the car. "1953 Kaiser Dragon," he said as Skies came up beside him to look inside. "Interior was pretty much okay since it was closed up in a barn, but there were plenty of holes in that building to let in the elements. Did a hell of a number on all the running parts."

"What are you doing with it?"

David looked at her as if she'd missed something obvious. "Raymond told me to find it and fix it up."

"The Raymond you don't know?" she asked.

"...and this is the part that convinced my brother I need to be under institutional care and hopped up on anti-hallucinogens." He straightened from looking inside the car and began to dig through tools and parts on a nearby workbench. "It's hard to explain. I hear Raymond, I see his car, and I get led around like I'm on strings to where pieces of things might be - that's as simple as it gets." Finding a small box, David returned to lean past Skies and into the car, fiddling for a moment before a small, bright light lit the interior. "Viola - another piece restored."

"You're not crazy," said Skies softly. "You just have something in you that listens. It scares people because they can't hear the ambiance of the world. When they do, they call it ghosts…"

The sudden buzzing of a small alarm broke into the moment and David moved quickly to silence the app on his phone. The intrusion broke the camaraderie of the moment - Skies blinked herself back to her present and looked toward the open doors of the garage and the dark blue of the near night.

"I would go too, if I were you," David said, pushing the door of the Kaiser closed. "Steven is going to be here any minute and I hear they make hospital escapees around here eat even worse food than what's at that cafeteria if they find them."

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Skies didn't go far.

The edge of the property was bordered by trees. She stayed out of the sight of the dog and waited there, watching the constellations move through the leaves. An hour went by, maybe more, before she made her way back to the garage. The little light in the Kaiser was shining again and the rear door was partially open. David lay sprawled across the cracked vinyl of the back seat, arms wrapped around himself, shivering slightly.

Skies crawled in and sat on the floorboards.

"It's the side-effects," he said through chattering teeth. He hadn't even opened his eyes, just knew she was there. "Supposed to make you wish you were dead to take your mind off being crazy." He coughed a humorless laugh, then groaned and curled in on himself.

Skies didn't say anything, just put a cool hand on his damp forehead. Her eyes went distant for a moment, then there was a strange, acrid smell as the medicine leached out of David's pores and evaporated. He sighed deeply and dropped into the sleep of one to whom it had not been a friend for a long time.

Steven James, surprised beyond measure, found her still there in the small hours of the morning. "I take it you have a problem with hospitals," he said in annoyance as she pulled herself out of the Kaiser.

"The worst day I can remember was in a hospital," she replied.

"What day was that?"

"The day I was born," said Skies. She walked out of the garage to stand under the waning stars.


	9. Chapter 9

"Let me get this straight, Jeahana," said Steven James. "You said that you've never been to the doctor, never had a physical or been, well, sick at all. Is that right?" They were in an exam room at the hospital to which Dr. James had brought her back whether she liked it or not.

"And your aunt took care of you by herself, right?" asked Jessie, who had insisted on acting as a sort of chaperone - looking after Skies' self-interests, whatever they might be.

"She said she didn't think anything could hurt me," Skies shrugged. "I used to fall down a lot, just to see. She told me about vampires once, said I had a lot in common with Dracula."

"Yeah, well," muttered Jessie under her breath. "I think that's about to fall into the "no shit" category."

"Do you know why you were brought to the hospital, Jeahana?" Dr. James asked. His tone of voice sounded as if he were trying to speak to a person of less than a child's intelligence.

"You're not here to help me," she said, suddenly seeming to be more than just Skies. "You're here to find out why I didn't drown; to do tests and studies so that you can make sense of things you think shouldn't be possible."

"People just don't spring back to life the way you did. I think…"

"I don't care what you think," Skies said flatly. "And I'm not interested in any of your tests." She narrowed her eyes just a bit. "I don't like what you do."

Suddenly, the air vents in the room began to blow powerfully, filling the space with a strange wind.

"I don't like how you treat people who are different."

The small sink began to gush water, the pressure popping the spigot off a moment later.

"What the hell's going on here?" Dr. James looked wildly around for a source of the commotion.

"What you already know," said Skies as the lights buzzed and the roomed plunged into darkness. "I'm not like other people." Then she calmly opened the door and walked out.

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David found her, much later, sitting outside of ICU. "Uh, hey," he said.

"She's in there," Skies said without even looking at him. "My Aunt Caroline, and I still can't talk to her. We might as well be back out with the old cars because nothing has changed."

"About that," David suddenly interjected. He walked up to kneel beside where she sat and yanked up the sleeve of his shirt. The wound which only yesterday had been bandaged and bleeding were only deep, puckered scars.

"I really didn't mean to hurt you," she said.

Realization seemed to dawn on him in that moment, but he shook it off, needing to talk about more recent wonders. "No, no, you did something to me and it was way...different than hurting me!"

Skies raised her eyes to his and David couldn't hold back.

"I...I didn't figure it out...until I realized that the last time I slept like that - I can't even remember! You, uh, zapped me or, I don't know but I've been running around all morning like I was 18 again. I figured out in, like, five minutes how to bypass those rusted parts on the Keiser and how to get it running again and I had this sort of vision about just the things I need. I've had so much focus, Raymond might as well be working right with me because somehow now I know that car inside and out and…" He suddenly dropped to the bench beside her. "Do you believe me?"

"Have you ever read Einstein?" she asked by way of an answer. "He believed in life after death because energy can never cease to exist." Skies now dropped her gaze to her own hands where they lay, palms up, in her lap. "It relays, it transforms, but it doesn't stop. Einstein said that if we ever got to the point where we could use all our brain that we'd be pure energy and that we wouldn't even need bodies." She put one hand in the other, rubbing hard at the pale skin with a thumb as if trying to wipe wipe away paint - hoping to discover something else underneath.

David suddenly situated his own hand between hers, his warm fingers wrapping around her own in a gentle grasp. She now lightly traced that pale thumb over the back of his hand. The hair on his arms stood on end as if lightning were about to strike.

"She was afraid to touch me, Aunt Caroline," Skies said quietly. "She said it was like brushing her finger over a light socket." The hair on David's head began to stand out statically.

Then, almost imperceptibly, a little electric buzz went through the lights, the computer at the nurses station, a tiny spark in David's hair.

"Whoa," he breathed, brushing nervously at his scalp. "Was that you?"

Skies shook her head, then lifted a doleful gaze to him. "Aunt Caroline."


End file.
